


lockstep, frogmarch

by chuchisushi



Series: bind up your brittle battalion; we march again to war [3]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Character Study, Established Relationship, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Team as Family, Unreliable Narrator, but lowkey, making shit up about the guardians, read whatever you'd like into bodhijyncassian, this entire fic is literally just that intimacy trope of dressing another person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-20
Updated: 2017-01-20
Packaged: 2018-09-18 07:13:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9373901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chuchisushi/pseuds/chuchisushi
Summary: They cobble together robes for Baze, take whole cloth and castoffs to spin together faith.Or: Rogue One prepare for an award ceremony.





	

**Author's Note:**

> filled for [a kmeme prompt](http://rogueonekink.dreamwidth.org/1084.html?thread=404028#cmt404028) that wandered a little bit, because none of my fics behave themselves.
> 
> thanks as always go to my brother, for betaing despite me tearing him away from his beloved ffxiv patch.

Jyn barely has the span of a heartbeat between when she knocks on Baze and Chirrut’s door and when it hisses open.

She glances down and to the side automatically, alerted by something – a flicker of movement, instinct, the whisper of her hindbrain telling her that she’s being watched – and meets Cassian’s eyes; they hold, looking at each other, frozen, for a heartbeat more, until he smiles up at her, sincere, from where he’s seated on the floor, one arm up on the door control and the other holding a sabacc hand (it’s terrible, Jyn notes automatically.) She smiles back, and if anything that just makes Cassian’s grow, but she steps inside the room, the door shutting after her as Cassian takes his hand off the control; she looks up, breaking their stare, and does a quick sweep, automatically counting heads. Bodhi sits across from Cassian on the floor, backed up into the corner; he’s wearing only an undershirt and a pair of soft pants that look like they’d been taken from someone else. He’s frowning down at his own hand of cards, a crease between his brows; his skin is still pink and stretched too-tight over his bones in some places with the burns he’d sustained, but he doesn’t wince every time he smiles or speaks, now. His gaze flicks briefly up to hers, and the corners of his eyes crinkle in nonverbal welcome before he plucks two cards from the ones he’s holding. Ah. He must still be mastering the sabacc variation Cassian had introduced in an attempt to spare them some dignity. (Jyn mentally revises the decency of Cassian’s hand.)

The lens on Kaytoo’s box flares and narrows with an audible mechanical whirr as Jyn looks to where he’s been placed upon a chair, surveying the room as well. They, all five of them, were still searching for droid parts Katyoo was willing to use – Jyn doesn’t mention it to the others, but she thinks that his current cubical form, little better than a camera, a speaker, and his internal procedural workings, lets him stay close to Cassian. Makes Cassian or other members of Rogue One carry him, lets him know where they are, tangibly, at all times. Kaytoo had known (with terrible, exact clarity) just how miraculous it was that they’d returned from Scarif at all, nevermind the wounds they then had to survive (Cassian is already wearing the simple back brace the medics had given him despite the morning hour. Jyn’s steps clink no matter how she tries to school herself to silence, the struts on her still-healing leg rattling.) He doesn’t, then, seem to be quite willing to give up their proximity just yet.

“Jyn does not appear to be dressed any more appropriately for an award ceremony than the rest of you,” Kaytoo observes, and Cassian snorts. “But at least she is wearing enough clothing to satisfy societal norms.” Bodhi hides his smile at the implied ‘unlike the rest of you’ that they can all hear, and, across the room, Chirrut makes an intrigued noise, reaching out with one hand to splay it against Baze’s chest where the other sits facing him.

“Baze!” Chirrut exclaims, laughing, insincere. “Why did you not tell me you were indecent? I have been squandering the opportunity!” Jyn snickers even as she turns her steps towards where the pair are on the floor; Baze makes a noise of tolerant exasperation and catches Chirrut’s chin in his free hand.

“Hold still, you wretched animal,” he tells Chirrut, who only grins wider, unrepentant; both are clothed only in thin pants, their feet bare, and surrounding them on all sides is an army of tiny pots and jars, a set of brushes laid out on a strip of cloth next to Baze’s hip, a palette of powders resting next to Chirrut’s, closed. Jyn’s steps slow as she takes in the multitude of cosmetics, and she feels her brows rise. She looks up just in time for Baze to click his tongue in reprimand at Chirrut before he paints the swoop of an arch against the other’s skin, releasing him after. “There. Go on, then.” He shakes his head as he sits back, and the motion catches light on the handfuls of gleaming beads woven into his hair, sleek now and tamed into an intricate network of braids that crowns him, swept up in a twist at the back of his skull and fastened with – she squints – a sheath for a weapon of some sort, some too-sharp needle. Jyn can see the seams where it would be drawn.

“It is,” she says, clearly, “an award ceremony to honor Rogue One. Not a pitfight.”

Chirrut grins at her as he rises, and it makes the red lining his lashes, delineated in framing designs about his eyes, look like war paint. They’re edged in black, his lids dusted light, and he takes her hands in his (feet sure as he picks through the minefield of tiny bottles and jars), squeezes them. She squeezes back. “Is it not one and the same in some ways? Both places to showcase and honor one's strength?” he asks, voice lilting, and then leans in, tone dropping conspiratorially. “Help me convince Bodhi to wear some beads in his hair, too.”

“Wearing an Imperial uniform to the ceremony is enough,” Bodhi calls out to them. “Even if it’s just the cut of it. That’s more than enough, really. I’m good.”

Chirrut heaves a disappointed sigh and untangles himself from Jyn, making his way back to where he’d been sitting, each step placed sure and firm. Jyn’s eyes go to the modified weapons rack against the wall where Bodhi’s jumpsuit, recreated with the Rebellion’s patches on its shoulders, hangs. Chirrut’s lightbow and Baze’s blaster rest there as well, and Jyn stares at both for a long moment before she says, “You plan to take weapons to the ceremony?” Each has been carefully polished, cleaned, and though they still clearly bear the marks of years of use, it is also just as obvious that they’ve been prepared – prepared in the same way that…

Jyn half-turns to where Baze is carefully outlining the breadth of one of the newest burn scars on Chirrut with something from one of the pots, making it gleam even brighter than the inherent shininess of the healed tissue. “You should wear the mourning eclipse at least,” Baze says. “Lower lip. You were of Jedha as well.”

“… I’ll think about it,” Bodhi replies, and Baze smiles briefly, bittersweetly, as his eyes flick up to meet Jyn’s.

“We are both weapons already, little sister. That was what it was to be a Guardian. So we remember, like this, because this ceremony is more than us.”

“Though, speaking as a weapon to a weapon, my husband’s edge in hand-to-hand has certainly dulled,” Chirrut interjects, and Baze rolls his eyes.

“We both know my skills were elsewhere,” he returns. He sets down one jar and picks up another, selects a slender brush from the set at his side, and dips it in. The bristles come away gold, and Baze leans forward, carefully painting into starkness the lines of the lightning flower scarred into Chirrut’s skin, illuminating the path of the old wound bright over the length of his arm, the breadth of his chest back down.

“He is so meticulous,” Chirrut confides to Jyn. “I still have so much to paint on him as well – the marksman’s sights of a grandmaster, the weaponsmith’s bars. The mentor’s thorns, the adept’s marks, the lesser grappler’s – ”

“You can leave those off,” Baze retorts. “Both of us know you were a demon in the ring; it’s not so surprising that I’m out of practice.” He traces Chirrut’s scar gold to the hem of the pants he’s wearing. Starts painting in the former surgical stitches on Chirrut’s abdomen, draws the brush lightly over the feathered edges of the darker burns healed on his flesh.

“ – and all his wounds, too,” Chirrut continues as though Baze had never spoken. He leans back on his hands. “If we had the paint and the time, I’d limn every single one, but alas. The ceremony is this afternoon!” Jyn watches Baze work, and Chirrut tips his head to one side, a smile tugging at his lips. “The worst injuries – the ones that threatened our lives, that nearly broke us, those are gold.” He raises one hand, motions at the lightning picked out on his frame. “This one took my sight, decades ago.” He raises a hand to touch careful at the red swoops and whorls lining his top lids, framing his silver eyes. “The highest rank of marksman’s sights I was able to earn, after.”

“After?” she echoes.

“He’s stubborn,” Baze grunts.

“The most skilled of us – the grandmasters of the Guardians, those that led and guided – they’d have faces so covered in paint by the end of their preparations that they’d look like opera masks.” Chirrut laughs and extends one leg to nudge at Baze, his toes curling in the fabric of the other’s pants. “This one was getting close to it. He certainly already had the stone-faced countenance.” Baze slaps at Chirrut’s ankle before grabbing it as the other persists. Chirrut bares his teeth in a grin.

“It will take that long to prepare?” Jyn asks, ignoring the little scuffle that ensues with learned practice.

“They’ve been at this since dawn.” Cassian calls out to her, voice dry. She turns, eyebrows raised, and he shrugs his shoulders at her before Bodhi lays down all the cards in his hands with a noise of triumph. Cassian squawks in outrage when he notices.

“Sparring first. Morning kata, and – ” Baze grunts as he successfully pins both of Chirrut’s legs under one arm. Reaches forward to pinch Chirrut’s nose shut between two fingers, expression all fond exasperation. “Then cleaning ourselves, our gear, our robes. Then the painting.” Chirrut’s eyes cross, and he blows out a breath through his mouth, flopping backwards to the floor in evident surrender. Baze releases him when he does.

“There weren’t many mirrors on Jedha then; there are better uses for the glass. So we would mark each other, act as mirrors for our brothers and sisters and comrades. Those that needed to would take the time to meditate, prepare their bodies for the endurance of whatever ceremony they’d be walking in,” Chirrut adds from his place on the floor. 

“They do them shirtless and barefoot,” Bodhi clarifies. “Outside, if they can. The only time they don’t is if it’s during a dust storm, but – everything’s still carved out of stone.” He pauses, hands stilling on the deck of cards, jaw working. “Uh. No. Was. Was carved.” Stares off into the middle distance as they all still, simultaneously arrested in remembrance, until Cassian leans forward to cover his fingers with his own, upon which Bodhi twitches back into life. Ducks his head, shuffles the cards. Jyn thinks of the bitter, dry cold of Jedha, the clammy chill of Saw’s caves, the unyielding frigidity of the rock under her knees, and shivers, turning back to Baze and Chirrut.

“Mastery of the body is one of the tenants,” Baze answers peaceably, solemnly, slowly. “The little brothers and sisters and others, they were exempt, but if you’d earned the marks of mastery and were hail enough for the techniques, yes. Why else go to the trouble of painting our scars?”

“I thought it was symbolic,” she replies somewhat helplessly, and Chirrut chuckles nudging Baze once more with a foot.

“Does this old man seem the sort to tolerate metaphor?” he quips.

“Funny,” Baze growls. “I’m certain she would have said much the same of you in our youth.” And that, to Jyn’s astonishment, makes Chirrut blush even as he laughs. She shakes her head and goes to be dealt into the card game, joining Cassian and Bodhi on the floor, her back to a wall. Cassian obligingly, unconsciously, shifts to put his to the rest of the room. (It’s alright. It’s alright. They are on the base at Yavin 4 and Baze and Chirrut have extended their pairwise vigilance to include them. Kaytoo sits on a chair, watching the door. Cassian has a blaster fastened to his hip. It’s alright. It’s alright. Jyn breathes.)

She watches, between turns, Baze powder Chirrut’s forehead white, his cheekbones dark in a gradient that spills down his face. Watches him paint careful, swooping lines with sharp points on top, bands of color around his deltoids and ankles. Red circles on the tops of his feet, and rows of tallies with gridlike precision against his brow. Line his lower eyes with gold. They are silent – mostly silent, now, just the occasional exchange of words too low for the rest to hear, and Jyn breathes in the way they’re all collected here and tucks in her chin, smiling down at her hand. Chirrut paints Baze, and his lines are yet sure, unwavering as he applies red gradients to the hollows of Baze’s eyes, white to the slope of his brow down the bridge of his nose, darkens the lees of his cheeks and throat, guiding himself via touch and apparent old memory. Paints his eyelids white and then lines them in red and then in black, sweeping out the length of the pigment in swoops like wings, drawing marksman’s sights more intricate than his own, Baze murmuring colors to him. Gilts his beloved’s scars and paints bands and circles upon him, double lines for his deltoids and biceps, wrists, ankles. At one point Cassian checks the time, and they gather up the cards. Jyn fetches Bodhi’s jumpsuit from the weapons rack, and both she and Cassian help steady him as he balances, shedding his boots to step into it. The red of the Alliance settles against his shoulders, and they all spend a quiet second or two admiring the way it lies, a modified firebird for a dead deserter reborn. They let him lace up his boots on his own.

Jyn helps get Cassian out of the back brace he’s in, sets it aside and waits while he sheds his shirt, stripping down to the fabric closest to skin as Bodhi fusses with the cuffs of his flightsuit. Both she and Cassian watch as he crosses the room to where Baze and Chirrut still sit, as he bends to exchange words with them, and Baze inclines his great head and half-turns to pick out one of the little pots he’s next to. Jyn presses the length of the fuller brace to Cassian’s back, this one more of a harness than mere support, lays its ends flat where it cradles the tops of his hips with hands that do not shake. He fastens it in the front, settles as she takes the ends of the lacing of it in both hands and pulls until there’s tension, Cassian arching under it as his spine realigns. “Enough?” she asks, and Cassian stares across the room, at Baze and Chirrut and Bodhi, gaze turned inwards in self-evaluation, before nodding.

She ties them off tight, riggers’ knots that Saw had taught her, once, a lifetime ago, following his instructions with steady hands. Bodhi’s eyes flutter shut, long lashes stark against the mingled tan-pale-pink of his skin, as he kneels, as Baze paints a single full circle at the center of Bodhi’s lower lip, the pigment black. Both she and Cassian watch as he selects the thinnest brush from the set laid at his side to add the smallest rime of white to its bottom edge. Bodhi releases the breath he’d been holding in a gust of air, his eyes screwing up tight as though with pain, but he opens them after the span of one, two heartbeats at the clasp of Baze’s hand on one shoulder, Chirrut’s fingers around the wrist of his other arm.

Bodhi rises. Cassian puts his outer shirt back on and fastens his pants. Jyn watches Bodhi walk back to them, and the mark stands out lurid against the crease of his lips, bottomless, hungry, an absence. The white wells up like light. Like tears. It brands him, the same as the scar she wears now, a slash that crookedly bisects her mouth, a souvenir of a stone kicked up by the backwash of the shuttle’s burners on Scarif. It hadn’t hurt at the time, but it had stained her clothing unsalvageable and if she grins too wide, now, it gapes. Bodhi, as if he knows her thoughts, raises a hand when he reaches her. Hesitates, then presses it to the hollow just below her lower lip. She sighs. Bodhi’s hair has been braided, too.

Cassian removes Kaytoo from the chair (“Baze, Chirrut, can I – ?” “The kit’s under my blaster pack.”), seats himself on another as he sets to Kaytoo’s chassis with the metal polish and a rag. Jyn takes the spot that Kaytoo had been vacated from (it is ever so slightly warm from his inner workings.) Bodhi’s fingers are gentle as he picks the tie to her hair out, as he cards through her tangles with a fine-toothed comb. Kaytoo’s lens whirrs, and Cassian sneaks glances up at them every minute or so. She smiles at him whenever she catches his eye. Chirrut paints the splashes of the blaster scars on Baze’s shoulder and hip pearlescent. He paints the new, knotted former wound below Baze’s fifth rib gold, the mark of the worst of the shrapnel taken when he’d flung himself over Chirrut before the grenade blew. Jyn had torn her bloody shirt to shreds to pack against it in the shuttle, cursing the turbulence of their flight and the way Baze’s jumpsuit had turned dark umber, even as _he’d_ ripped Chirrut’s robes open to feel for a pulse, every breath coming wet and wracking as he’d chanted, “The Force is with me and I am one with the Force.” His sides had shook underneath Jyn’s steady hands.

Bodhi braids her hair. Weaves the fall of her bangs up into the rest of it and brings in locks to build the arch of a plait that lies flat against her scalp. Does the same on the other side, gentle, so gentle, and connects the strands at the back of her head, tying them together. He’d learned for – from – his sister, he’d confessed one long, endless night in the medical ward, the three of them sleepless, had said it so soft into the velvet void that held them. Jyn had barely dared breathe. Bodhi smooths his hand over the fall of her hair and gathers it up, twists it deft into a bun, and then slides the tie from the braid to fasten it back up like before. But. Looser, perhaps. They both look up in time to catch Cassian’s smile, the soft whirr of Kaytoo’s lens.

“It hardly looks any different from earlier,” the droid remarks a trifle sourly. Jyn laughs, and Cassian hides his grin in the curve of his hand. “I do not see what all the fuss is about.”

“Glad you won’t have to stand for this, Captain Andor?” Jyn calls out, and Cassian takes a moment to compose himself before replying.

“Incredibly. You’ll both have to be extra stiff-backed for me,” he tells them, and it bites at Jyn on some level that they cannot honor him in the way he deserves to be, but he is an Intelligence officer, and if they were compromised…

So they’ll stand in his stead up on that podium, just as worn and battered as he, and stand even straighter for it, for remembrance of the dirty work done and the lives lost and those that couldn’t be there: the defector, the pilot, the man who had endured the hate of both sides, lost, and persevered despite it to redeem himself, to make up for even a fraction of what he’d caused, strong in his convictions. The paired Guardians, bent but not broken, honoring a faith and a city and its people now lost, an entire planet and more and _more_ (and _oh_ , how the faith had _returned_ and oh, _how_ the Force had _answered_ , coming to them in the form of a blue-eyed farmboy too-young too-bright), wildness willingly tamed to the hand, living weapons lurid in their mastery and armored in memories of strength.

And she. The daughter of Galen Erso. The daughter of Saw Gerrera. The daughter of the oppression the Empire crushed its people under, and the daughter of the resistance, and the daughter of Lyra Erso, the daughter of the dead. She with her too-steady hands and her too-steady gaze, with flecks of reflected light shining in her eyes: stardust, potential, a nebula, what was and what could have been and what could be. Someday they will break down into their base components. Be swallowed by the vacuum of space. All that _they_ ever were will be lost – and yet not. Perhaps they will aggregate again: her father. Her mother. Saw and his men, fighting a desperate, wary fight. The dust of cold Jedha and the engineers killed on rainy Eadu for nothing more than the guilt of association, for knowing too much. All those lost on the beaches of Scarif, all the beloveds they left behind. Those who had leapt into the breech in the sky above. Orson Krennic himself, slain by his own legacy.

(She had heard, once, a funeral dirge. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. She is nothing more and nothing less to them, to Rogue One, to the Alliance, to the Empire, to the Force. Nothing but dust against the unfathomable breadth of space.

But all matter needs only the smallest of energy to aggregate. The rustle of static as tiny particulates slide past each other. They clump and they grow, build and condense.

And the strongest stars have hearts of kyber. She is no star – not anymore, burnt out too-quick too-young. But there is kyber amongst the debris of her destruction, and, into the void, it _sings_.)

Chirrut pulls on his robes as Baze begins closing jars, putting stoppers in pots, setting aside brushes to be cleaned; he bares himself to the waist and stills when Baze catches his chin, careful, to paint a black circle rimed with white into the flesh of his lower lip. Chirrut holds until he lets go, then takes the brush and paint from him and does the same to Baze, impossibly precise. When they part, Chirrut goes to the bedside table, fishes from it a small, worn pouch that jingles, ever so slightly. He opens it and tips out hammered gold into his hand, hums as he aligns each piece in his palm, these hollow, triangular sheathes.

“Jyn,” Baze calls, and she looks to him, at the wildness of his face painted brazen in proclamation of his achievements, to where he’s holding the little pot of paint and the brush to it. He motions with it, one brow raised, and she bites her cleft lower lip, looks up at Bodhi, across to Cassian. He is offering, but for this ceremony she will be _more_ than just Jyn Erso –

Cassian inclines his head. Bodhi clasps her shoulder and squeezes it, gentle. She squeezes back, about his wrist, as she rises, and Baze’s hands are so large and so rough but they are as deft as any mechanic’s, as any surgeon’s, when they paint the pink, gaping edges of her former wound gold.

She sits on the bed with Cassian, Bodhi, Kaytoo, watching as Baze struggles into his robes (“Is it too late to wear my armor?” “And cover my hard work? No, Baze Malbus, you said the answering litany, you’re stuck with the robes.”) Watch as they break open a pot of red ochre, as Baze colors one palm and the span of his hand, as he dips the fingers of the other in, as Chirrut covers both hands and colors his as well. They take up their weapons, and their touch upon well-worn straps and stocks paints them, too, synthesizes them into the memory of ceremony. Chirrut grins up at Baze with his too-wide smile, and the lights catch on hammered gold crowning his canines, top and bottom both.

(“I earned them,” he says, as though he can feel Jyn staring. “A trial of strength. It was a glorious fight.”

“And none of us understood then why the grandmasters gilt this mad dog’s teeth in reward. You fought dirty,” Baze adds, dryly. Chirrut laughs.

“You were all so envious! But I earned the full set fair and square, dirty or not.” He touches Baze’s elbow, the inside of his wrist when Baze rests knuckles briefly at the crook of his jaw, smiles like a devil, and Jyn, in that moment, can almost see the young, wild Guardian Chirrut must have been, vicious, irreverent, and laughing with it. “Needs must, my Baze. We still remain. It was more than fair trade, our survival in exchange for the rest of my gilt-gold fangs. It didn’t change the sharpness of them, now, did it?”

Neither of them seem to care about the red marks they’ve left on the other. But maybe, maybe that’s fitting, Jyn thinks.)

 

When they walk the length of the ceremony hall, they do so with their steps falling in tandem, their heads held high and their spines straight. When Jyn stands on the podium, when she turns, her eyes go to the most-unobtrusive corner and find Cassian’s figure tucked into it, Kaytoo’s chassis in his hands. He inclines his head at her, just barely. The weight of the medal is a heavy thing about her neck.

Jyn breathes out and bares her teeth when she smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> i know lightning flowers/lichtenberg figures aren't Technically permanent in most instances of individuals getting struck by lightning, i'm just going to handwave that for the sake of symbolism. i mean there's gotta be a good reason his staff is made of wood now


End file.
